representativeness heuristic

The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias that causes people to use information that is readily available and easily remembered to make decisions and judgments. People tend to overestimate the probability of an outcome or event occurring if it is easy to recall from memory. For example, if someone recently read a story about a shark attack, they might overestimate the risk of being attacked by a shark. The representativeness heuristic is a cognitive bias whereby people judge the likelihood of something occurring based on how similar the event or outcome is to something that already exists or is already known. For example, people may think that all millionaires drive luxury cars and live in big mansions. This heuristic is based on the assumption that similar events or outcomes tend to be linked to each other.